I have set my home page to use a static template. So I created a Blog page to use a blog template to render my blog posts. The problem is it just renders the page content. I want it to render blog posts. Minus that of category "portfolio" & "WIP". Do I need to create a custom query_posts? what might it look like. To simulate what I get by default if my home page is set to latest posts. I will also need pagination to work.

I saw the codex and actually wondered if I need to add publish = true posttype = post etc for example. They are the defaults but I wonder since its a page, and the query_posts looks more like posttype=page&page=x I need to re-specify the params
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Jiew MengFeb 19 '11 at 1:43

Also is there a way to exclude categories by nicenames not ids?
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Jiew MengFeb 19 '11 at 1:44